Molecular Matters

In the early 1980s, the emergence of a previously unknown and fatal disease, raised concern amongst medical professions and fear in the general population. Those suffering from this new disease presented with a range of opportunistic infections, including rare forms of pneumonia and cancer – suggesting the cause was a failing immune system. Thirty years on, we now refer to … Read More

On Friday 31st of October Dr Siouxsie Wiles from Sciblogs very own Infectious Thoughts blog gave an excellent interview of Breakfast TV explaining why homeopathy isn’t an appropriate treatment for ebola (or anything else). Now Vicki Hyde from NZSkeptics has presented a thorough explanation of why homeopathy is not a valid medical treatment on CTV, including a demonstration of … Read More

A petition calling for the World Health Organisation (WHO) to “test and distribute homeopathy as quickly as possible to contain the (Ebola) outbreaks” is unlikely to gain much traction, given that the WHO, in August 2009, made statements indicating that homeopathy was not an effective treatment for diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoea or HIV infection. Unfortunately, Green MP Steffan … Read More

I’ve always been fascinated by the evolution of modern medicine, particularly the development of modern pharmaceuticals, so I was looking forward to catching “Pain, Pus & Poison – The Search For Modern Medicine” on Sky TV, however, managed to miss the first episode. Luckily I discovered the episodes are also available on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni-pK2EBxaw The first episode covers the … Read More

I was channel surfing yesterday and caught the end of a science piece on graphene and its’ use in flexible computer screens. The story was on the programme “On the Money” a financially focused programme on CNBC, and was showing on one of the Sky channels. It was an interesting piece but I had to cringe when the scientist being … Read More

I ask this question after the post-election reporting that I have seen over the last couple of days, including that in the general media and on TV programmes The Nation and Q+A. Consider the following examples: This morning I heard one radio commentator suggest today would be “Coup 2”, that is that David Cunliffe would be rolled as leader of … Read More

Last week I worked my way through Vote Compass, the final result being that my interests closely matched those of the Labour party. Before doing this exercise, I was tossing up between whether I would be voting for Labour or the Greens. So even though the description of Vote Compass claims it will not influence voting, I think it will. Read More

“Science is more Creative than Arts” This was the proposition of the debate that I took part in today as part of CPIT’s Research Month. As you might have guessed I was a member of the affirmative team. It was an interesting experience and very popular – the room we used was filled to capacity. The opposing team won … Read More

This morning on the Breakfast show on TV1 there was a piece on “adrenal fatigue” and how more and more people are displaying symptoms. The moment I heard the vagueness of this term, I had to wonder if it was a real medical term or pseudoscience. Minutes later another pseudoscience red flag went up when one of the interviewees … Read More

There is little doubt that some people have an intolerance to gluten and that a gluten free diet is an appropriate way to address this. However, the gluten free diet is also associated with pseudoscience in terms of what it can achieve and how it is diagnosed. Take, for example, the recent news that tennis player, Novak Djokovic, has embraced … Read More

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